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Washington (Platts)

A member of a key US House committee that approves the Department of Energy’s budget said Wednesday he remains unconvinced that DOE should exist without a formal national energy policy in place that would set benchmarks for its accomplishments.

Representative Mike Simpson, an Idaho Republican who sits on the House Appropriations Subcommittee for Energy and Water Development, told a meeting of DOE contractors that he was unsure whether DOE should be eliminated.

“I am a fan of DOE, and I am trying to come up with an answer. That is a problem,” he told an annual meeting of the Energy Facility Contractors Group, or EFCOG, an organization of DOE contractors.

Simpson added that his comments were not meant to be critical of DOE, but of the constantly shifting energy policy that changes with each new presidential administration.

“DOE was formed in the 1970s because of the energy crisis and our reliance on foreign energy sources. We are more reliant on foreign energy sources today than we were before. Is that a success story? I don’t know. I don’t think so,” Simpson said.

Simpson said that DOE’s activities in cleaning Cold War-era nuclear weapons sites has made progress, but he questioned the value of the agency’s research and development programs, especially those directed at advancing nuclear energy.

“What can I show the taxpayer we have gotten from the research and development budget in the DOE?” Simpson said. Simpson pointed to the current administration’s focus on small modular reactor research as an example of an initiative that could be abandoned when President Barack Obama leaves office and another administration comes in. DOE requested $96 million to support work on small modular reactors in 2012.

“It is not that I don’t see results, it is that I don’t know what I’m looking for because I don’t see an overall policy that has been developed by Congress so that I know that money spent on certain things are going toward achieving those overall results,” Simpson said.

Simpson left the contractors to attend a House Appropriations Committee meeting to consider DOE’s fiscal 2012 budget. The subcommittee on energy and water development last week approved a draft 2012 appropriations bill that would cut $5.9 billion from the administration’s $29.5 billion request.

Original Article